The Moral of the Intel Story

Who will be next?

I can’t tell you the number of times I thought about buying Intel for the very reason... it’s Intel. It has to come back.

And then I realized... no, it doesn’t.

As one friend who has analyzed chip and tech companies for a very long time put it...

At one point there was a company that was a pure beneficiary from the internet adoption from PCs to servers, data centers, and wired cars.

Any hot area of growth and they were in. There was almost nothing in tech that could run without their products. It was effectively a monopoly. Massive margins, massive earnings. Their products did not increase computing power by 10 times but probably closer to 1million times over the years.   

That company, of course, is Intel, arguably the most powerful force behind the original tech boom, elevating it to superstar status. Then-CEO Andy Grove was so revered that his 1996 book on Intel’s road to success, “Only the Paranoid Survive,” went on to become a best-seller... putting Intel on a golden pedestal as if it…